Of all the apparatuses presidents have at their disposal for making pronouncements—press secretaries, official statements, televised addresses from the Oval Office—the one President Trump used to trumpet forthcoming sanctions on Iran is by far the strangest: a Game of Thrones meme. On Friday morning the president posted the image below on Twitter. It’s a picture […]
This story originally appeared on The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Sea level rise driven by climate change is set to pose an existential crisis to many US coastal communities, with new research finding that as many as 311,000 homes face being flooded every two weeks within the next 30 years. The swelling oceans are […]
Last spring, filmmaker Paul Hough got a eerie bit of intel from his 12-year-old daughter: Apparently, an empty school bus had been spotted in their Los Angeles neighborhood, cruising around without any passengers inside. For Hough, a horror writer and filmmaker, the chilling incident proved inspirational. He quickly got to work on a video, titled […]
Pain is an indispensable tool for survival. The prick of a nail underfoot is a warning that protects you from a deep, dirty wound—and maybe tetanus. The sizzle of a steel skillet is a deterrent against a third-degree burn. As much as it sucks, pain, oddly enough, keeps us from hurting ourselves. It's a luxury […]
The middle of the TV season—aka the start of the new year—usually signals the closest thing television has to a midlife crisis. Sometimes it tries to reconnect with college friends. Sometimes it just tries something new and edgy. It can be a time of rejuvenation, or a desperate grab at relevance. But in the Age […]
This video shows a battle between samurai with jet packs. Don't get excited—it's fake. How do I know? There are a few obvious signs of fake-itude, starting with the shaking camera. This battle was likely recorded on a hand held phone—and if you went to all the trouble of creating a rocket pack, couldn't you […]
Try to think back to a time when the internet wasn’t a toxic mix of rage and false equivalence. Trick question! It’s always been. But for a few glorious years in the 1990s, it was also glittery and welcoming and amateurish and wonderful and absurd. It was the age of Geocities, and an era Marvel […]
After decades of heavy slog with no promise of success, quantum computing is suddenly buzzing with almost feverish excitement and activity. Nearly two years ago, IBM made a quantum computer available to the world: the 5-quantum-bit (qubit) resource they now call (a little awkwardly) the IBM Q experience. That seemed more like a toy for […]
Let me say this right off the bat: Most film geeks write down their predictions for the Oscars. This isn't that kind of story. Everything here is based on opinion, not on what will or should win. Play-along-at-home fans who fill out Oscar ballots each year often do one with their heads and one with […]
Humans lives their lives trapped in a glass cage of perception. You can only see a limited range of visible light, you can only taste a limited range of tastes, you can only hear a limited range of sounds. Them’s the evolutionary breaks. But machines can kind of leapfrog over the limitations of natural selection. […]